General information

We are now on the threshold of spring 2003. The NVIDIA NV25 which became a
forefather of the GeForce4 Ti line was released a year ago. Let's look through
the last two years. In winter 2001 the company launched NV20 (GeForce3) which
gave birth to many currently popular technologies. The new product - NV25 - should
have arrived half a year later if it were not ATI Technologies with its R200.
In autumn we got only the Ti 200/500 from the Titanium family as the GeForce3
line was referred to. They were not solutions on the new chip but simply updated
cards based on the same NV20 brought into the market because of the marketing
policy. That was the first malfunction of the NVIDIA's semi-annual cycle, and
the NV25 was released only a year ago. The GeForce4 Ti is the improved version
of the NV20: higher power of the 3D accelerator due to higher frequencies, 128MB
memory cards (and the attempt to make this size standard) etc. It seemed that
half a year later the industry could bring to life the NV30 which looked so mysterious.
Even if we ignore the previous delay with the NV25 (because the NV30 was to be
scheduled for 2002), the most optimistic forecasts indicated august 2002.

It seemed that we were on the edge of the new competition stage between ATI
and NVIDIA. The previous battle was lost by the Canadian because the RADEON 8500
was too expensive and could compete only against GeForce3, not GeForce4 Ti. However,
the NV25 had a lame anisotropic filtering and the ATI's solution could show comparable
performance in case this function was enabled, but at the same time it had inferior
anisotropic quality.

So, in summer 2002 the ATI's 3D flagship RADEON 9700 PRO came into the scene
with great fanfare. All previous solutions look faded, and ATI easily mounted
the 3D gaming throne. Where was the NV30? NVIDIA spent all summer and autumn months
to master the 0.13 micron fab process so that they could make a chip with 125
M transistors right on the new technological process. It's very likely that the
product was repeatedly redesigned to get an acceptable percentage of valid dies.
At last, in November they announced it and we could even feel the new cards but
they were still too raw including their drivers.

So, NVIDIA missed one more semi-annual cycle. The second release of the NV25
with the AGP 8x support in the form of NV28 is not counted because it was just
a marketing trick; besides, the AGP8x didn't help the NV28 because 128MB local
memory is now more than sufficient for all modern games. Thus, the gap between
NV20 and NV25 is actually a year, as well as between NV25 and NV30. As to ATI,
it keeps to a 9-month cycle, that is why in spring we expect its new products
R350 and RV350.

Who do they to stand against? NV30? Looks like that. Because the NV30 turned
out to be the most powerful accelerator (see the details below) but such cards
will be in great deficiency. As they were behind the schedule and also were going
to focus attention of their partners on the improved NV30 version - NV35, the
output of the NV30 dies was cut down. There were only about 100 000 pcs produced.
Taking into account a very high cost of the NV30 and the NVIDIA's strategy to
release a chip for professional graphics first (NV??GL) and only then a gaming
solution (NV??), it was logical that NVIDIA decided to use the most part of the
NV30 chips for production of the Quadro FX. Fortunately, the prices for professional
accelerators are traditionally high, and it's possible to make up for the huge
expenses for the NV30. As you know, a part of new cards always go to OEM companies,
and the retail market will get only a small portion of the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra
(the rumor has it that such cards won't be available on the open market at all).
Most likely, the remaining GPUs will be used for GeForce FX 5800 cards. By the
way, the NV30 chip is used for the whole line:

We also expect cheaper and less speedier versions named NV31 and NV34. The
company says they will be simply cut-down versions based on the NV30, and the
expenses for the NV3X technologies development must be covered by the sales of
such cards. We will return to this issue later, and now we move on to the NV30
itself.

Characteristics:

0.13 micron fabrication process, copper connections.

125M transistors

3 geometrical processors (each exceed the specs of the DX9 VS 2.0)

8 pixel processors (exceed the specs of the DX9 PS 2.0 markedly)

Flexibly configurable array of 8 pipelined texture filtering units calculates
up to 8 sampled and filtered results at a clock.

AGP 3.0 (8x) system interface

128 bit (!) DDR II interface of the local memory

Effective 4-channel memory controller with a crossbar

Developed optimization techniques for the local memory: full frame buffer
compression including color data (for the first time the compression ratio is
set to 4:1, only in the MSAA modes), and depth (Z buffer compression)

Tile optimization: caching, compression and Early Cull HSR

Support of precise integer-valued formats (10/16 bit per component) and precise
floating-point formats (16 and 32 bits per component - also known as 64 and 128
bit color) for the textures and frame buffer

Through accuracy of all operations - 32 bit floating-point arithmetic

Being activated, the new algorithm of optimized anisotropic filtering reduces
the performance drop (fps) without bad quality degradation

Anisotropic quality up to 8? of the usual bilinear texture, i.e. up to 128
discrete samples per one texture fetch

Texture & Color Interpolators - they are interpolators of texture coordinates
and color values calculated as output parameters in the vertex processor. These
units calculate for each pixel processor its unique input parameters according
to the position of a pixel it is shading.

Card

The card comes with Samsung's memory chips K4N26323AE-GC1K
of the BGA form-factor. The maximum frequency of 550 (1100) MHz, that is why the
access time must be 1.8 ns. The memory runs at 500 (1000) MHz in 3D and at 300
(600) MHz in 2D.

Well, this is the fast memory for today in mass (and pre-mass) production.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra 128MB

The first thing catching the eye here is a gigantic cooler. Because the cooler's
fastening is very complicated and the heatsink is toughly glued to the chip, I
didn't take the cooler off, and above you can see one of the cards we tested before.
Although there are some slight differences in the PCBs, the boards can be considered
practically identical.

Here is an example when the attempt to take off the cooler tore off the chip's
surface (by the courtesy of Yinchu Chan AKA Cho; the picture from popular Chinese
site http://www.gzeasy.com/):

By the way, we can estimate the die's size. And once we touched upon the chip,
note that unlike the ATI's R300, this die has an all-metal lid on, which protects
from splits and serves as an additional heatsink. The package is the same flip
FCPGA.

As expected, here we have the NV30GL. Why should we expect it? Above we mentioned
the new NVIDIA's strategy when it first makes a chip with all features for professional
and game needs. And then it locks some professional features to make gaming solutions.

The PCB is very complicated. Although it supports only the 128bit memory bus
the design consists of 12 layers, 2 for PCB shielding:

It protects the high-speed memory from pickups. Some say that the GDDR-II is
not easy in this respect. By the way, the memory is cooled very carefully. The
heatsink is made of copper alloy and there is also a thermo layer that ensures
100% heat transfer.

Now look at the impressive cooler FlowFX.

As you can see, the device is made of a copper plate
and a turbine cooler the fan of which pumps air through the pipe heatsink. The
pipes connecting the copper plate with this heatsink carry low-boiling liquid
which transfers heat.

As you can see, such a huge cooler made the card wider, that is why the first
PCI slot behind AGP can't be used. On the first "floor" of the card
are d-Sub, DVI and S-Video connectors, on the second - the hole for taking in
cold air and exhausting hot one.

The cooler has a lot of fasteners: two bolts and four clips on the copper plate's
edges near the memory chips. On the back is a spring bracket and a copper plate
for cooling the memory. Such a solid cooler is justified as the chipset and the
memory generate a great amount of heat. However, such turbine is not necessary
- we have some experience of working with the card using a usual cooler. No stability
problems were noticed. Just note that the memory needs cooling in any case, at
least, passive cooling.

The system makes a lot of noise (like any other turbine). Probably, to make
the squeak quieter the developers decided to lower the fan's frequencies together
with reducing the card's speed in 2D. We will speak about it in the drivers' section.

The fan's speed is probably controlled by changing the voltage because it has
no tachometer as shown on the pictures. Probably, there is a logic element under
the heatsink which controls the chip or the chips itself can do it, which is more
probable because the NV30 supports hardware temperature monitoring.

I spent quite a lot of time working with this card, and I must say that the
noise the FlowFX makes really gets on nerves when it switches from 2D to 3D changing
the noise level all the time. When a test is run in the packet mode, it's not
pleasant to hear how the cooler's revolutions constantly change.

The card is as long as the GeForce4 Ti 4600 based one. Besides, the card requires
external power supply, for which there is a special socket in the upper right-hand
corner (like that on the 3dfx Voodoo5 5500; by the way, it's curious that the
"FX" is named after 3dfx, the external power supply connector is like
on the Voodoo5, the card is long (almost like the Voodoo5 5500), and the number
5800 is not far from 5500 :-) ).

It's possible that such cards won't appear on the retail market, and maybe
the cooling system will be changed by the manufacturers.

And the last thing to note: we will omit operation of the TV-out of this card
because the review is too lengthy already. But we will touch upon it in the nearest
review of a similar solution (probably, it will be a production card based on
the GeForce FX 5800). Just note that this sample doesn't have a TV-out codec though
the seat is provided. The drivers notify that the TV codec is integrated into
the chip. We'll check it.

Overclocking

Unfortunately, overclocking is far not simple. But maybe this is a good thing
because of possible burning of such an expensive card. The monitoring controls
the frequencies and when we lift them it either slows down the card (like the
thermal protection of modern Intel processors) or returns the frequencies to the
default values with the driver according to information from the thermal sensors.
But we do not stop looking into this question.